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Zombie Transfusion (2009)

12th Feb 10

Plot
Three teenage lads find themselves in a town riddled with zombies.

Review
Welcome to Low Budget Land were three teenage guys, Chris, Scott and Tim, have just survived a bizarre day at school where one of their classmates inexplicably turned into a zombie. So to cheer themselves up, they decide to head in to town to see a grunge band play, while Chris's girlfriend Jackie heads to a frat party with a few of her more popular mates. On the way to town the guys notice that the roads are unusually empty for rush hour, and when they finally get there they find the streets are deserted. Where is everyone? What's that distant moaning sound? Unperturbed they make there way to the gig venue, and are suddenly pounced upon by hundreds of zombies.

After a short bit of soul searching, the three guys, with the help of a soon-to-buy-it shotgun wielding bartender decide to make there way back home to save their loved ones, and Chris intends to find Jackie at the party she was planning to go to. Meanwhile, Jackie's party went from inane teenage dialogue and potential nudity to being overrun by zombies just like town, with one girl getting her jaw ripped out. That’s pretty good, getting your jaw ripped out by a zombie, that’s one strong zombie.

So, what's going to happen? Is Chris going to get to Jackie in time? What are the other characters going to do? Where did that woods come from? Who's that girl with Tim all of a sudden? Why has Scott gone chainsaw suicide loony? And how are Chris and Jackie going to get through that door? Ah, who knows, maybe we'll have to wait for the sequel.

That's because Zombie Transfusion has a lot to answer for. It's built from the idea that if you get a ton of people together, splash them with red paint and film them running with a shaky cam it's going to look like a convincing running zombie horde. To be fair it often does, and the big zombie action sequences, particularly the party and the escape from the club, make this movie worth seeing. But it's more than that - when the film starts these guys really look like they know what they're doing - shots are well framed, angles are good, the characters seem surprisingly interesting for teenagers, the action bits are working for the obvious budget and it's all shaping up to be a great little zombie flick. Then we hit the middle of the film, and it all unravels before your very eyes.

Up until Chris nipping home after escaping the club (good scene actually), it's all going well. Then they go to Jackie's party to rescue her, and they start making it up as they go along. They enter Jackie's house through the door the survivors had seconds before had zombies piling through (eh?) find Jackie amazingly easily and somehow split up (eh?). Then characters start to do random things, like jumping into cars with other new random characters, jumping into zombie infested lakes, finding chainsaws in the middle of nowhere, that kind of stuff. It's almost like playing a certain popular zombie video, except you don't find medkits lying around. And then, just when you think they've completely run out of ideas, they really completely run out of ideas and the film stops.

I felt like finishing this review at the end of the last paragraph for a bit of fun, but that wouldn't be very nice. Suffice is to say that Zombie Transfusion starts off like a well made very low budget zombie movie with ample gore, and decends into a Swiss Cheese plotted mess. Having said that, it's only a mess in the same way as, say, a lot of those ridiculous Italian cannibal gut-munchers from the 80s are, and a lot of people, myself included, really like those films. This isn't up with those giddy heights and perhaps even a comparison is borderline blasphemy, but the reason those films pop in to mind is that, like those films, Zombie Transfusion likes to think it's a better movie than it actually is, which is probably why the love it / hate it posts on imdb are so extreme.

VersionsAvailable UK And US. Both versions are really terrible transfers though, as if they pressed the wrong buttons while trying to master the recording. Very strange, and a bit rubbish.